Zenith Parsing Engine

Short description: scripting language

YASS

Paradigm	Imperative, functional, object-oriented, procedural
Designed by	Jamie Balfour
Developer	Jamie Balfour
First appeared	2015 (2015)
Stable release	1.8.4 / April 26, 2020 (2020-04-26)
Typing discipline	Dynamic, weak
Implementation language	Java, YASS
OS	Unix-like, Windows
Filename extensions	.zpe, .zen, .zex, .zhtml, .zhtm
Influenced by
C, PHP, Java, JavaScript, VB.NET, C#.NET, SML, Python

ZPE Programming Environment (or simply ZPE) formally the Zenith Parsing Engine is a general purpose compiler, parser and interpreter for the YASS language designed for educational use as well as for its general use. The language it interprets, YASS, is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language. It was started in 2015 as a planned university project but later was changed to be a replacement for another programming language developing at the time known as BlackRabbit Script, also built by Jamie Balfour. ZPE and YASS were designed to help with automation of scripts by clearing up the inconsistent syntaxes of other scripting languages. The ZenithParser powers the underlying parsers including the CSV, JSON and XML parsers.

The language interpreted by the ZPE runtime is known as YASS or Yet Another Simple Syntax. Several languages influenced the YASS syntax including C, PHP, Java, JavaScript, VB.NET, C#.NET, SML and Python which has remained largely the same since about version 1.5.

The ZPE Programming Environment itself is written in Java making it cross-platform. A side effect of this is that certain plugins and built-in objects are completely written in Java.

Whilst ZPE is closed source, the standard library is open-source and written in YASS itself.

Features

ZPE features many built-in functions including functions that simplify mathematical problems such as the greater_than_all function, the to_binary, to_octal and to_hexadecimal functions as well as many functions to simplify processing of arrays such as list_process, list_find_duplicates and list_auto_populate. ZPE also features a built-in parser known as the ZenithParser which forms the foundation of the whole language processor and performs both lexical analysis and compiler optimisation on textual input.

On the original subsite dedicated to ZPE, there is a documentation page which documents all internal functions and their syntax.

ZPE was originally built as a planned university project that never came to fruition and in the end and was eventually used as the replacement for the BlackRabbit Script language that Jamie Balfour was developing at the time. ZPE originally had no mathematical parser which meant that functions were used for addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. An example of this early syntax:

$x = 10
$y = 15

$z = add($x, $y)

print($z)

In late 2015, still in version 1.3.x of ZPE, the Real Math Mode (RMM) parser was added. Syntax changed so that it looked a lot more like other languages:

$x = 10
$y = 15

$z = $x + $y

print($z)

To improve performance, the Real Math Mode parser was replaced by the Logical And Mathematical Parser (LAMP) in 2016 and then the Logical And Mathematical Evaluator (LAME) in 2019.

Libraries

ZPE/YASS rely on libraries being developed to extend functionality. The main reason behind this is to reduce the size of the main runtime package. Certain libraries are written in the YASS language itself and then compiled. They are then distributed via the ZULE network which was added in 2018.

Other libraries are written in native Java. For example, the zpe_mysql library is used to add MySQL functionalities to the language through the use of a library which itself is around 6 times the size of the original runtime.